


Eminent Edwardians

by disenchanted



Category: Bloomsbury Group RPF
Genre: Art History, James Strachey's questionable taste in interior design, Love Confessions, M/M, Unrequited Love, and Duncan Grant is in love with a safety-bicycle with genitals, everyone is in love with Duncan Grant, unsolicited rudeness about Rupert Brooke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:04:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bloomsbury bloomsberries bloomsbuggering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eminent Edwardians

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fantasio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fantasio/gifts).



> 'It was as if they were all caught up in a Scottish reel, the insistent pulse of the music and its interminable repetitions obliging them to form new partnerships.' —Frances Spalding, _Duncan Grant_.
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Fantasio. Your enthusiasm for the Bloomsbury Group is infectious; researching and writing this was a pleasure. I'm glad James Strachey isn't around to write scathing comments in the margins.
> 
> Thank you to my beta.

i. _l’affaire duncan_

August 1905

Great Oakley Hall, Northamptonshire

‘—Whether,’ said Lytton, lying on his back, looking up into the boughs of the apple tree above, ‘one must devote oneself to the craft, not to say the art, of it; to build ceaselessly, chambers upon chambers in one stunning temple—or whether fulfilment equally extraordinary is to be found in a practice more pagan, perhaps; in the promiscuous, which is not to say frivolous, pursuit of scattered delights, all diverse, but each in their own—’

Duncan, who lay beside Lytton, put his hand on the side of Lytton’s face. Amused, but not unserious, he said, ‘I do see your dilemma. Only I don’t think it can be worked out in any way but by doing one thing or the other.’

‘Oh, I do _do_ ,’ said Lytton, becoming pridefully unresponsive beneath Duncan’s touch. Which is not to say that he did not quiver to the foundations of his heart! Seized by a determination to show Duncan that he did, after all, do things, Lytton took Duncan into his arms. He marvelled at how fleshly, how pliant Duncan seemed when held against himself. Suppose Duncan found Lytton too arachnoid, too grotesque, his passions too bound up in his ungainly limbs. But Duncan allowed himself to be held; he lifted his boyish face, squinting into the sunlight that penetrated the spaces between the tree’s full leaves.

‘Shall I kiss you?’ asked Lytton. It was not the first time he had begged affection from Duncan, who was at one moment curious, another diffident. He took care to be delicate; though he rubbed his palm down Duncan’s back, he did not bring his lips any nearer to Duncan’s lips. 

Laughing, Duncan said, ‘There isn’t anything else to be done, is there? I can’t think of anything… So I suppose I must let you.’

At once the summer, the morning, the orchard were absorbed into the sensation of Duncan’s small body enfolded in Lytton’s arms. Lytton shut his eyes; he found the art of the moment not in any vision or image but in the taste of Duncan’s open mouth. For a long while they kissed each other, working up to a moment of frenzy and then retreating, passing their lips over cheeks or jaws. Duncan remained, however, the lovee: he flung his head back when Lytton wished to kiss his neck, he unbuttoned Lytton’s trousers after Lytton unbuttoned his. He was, thought Lytton enviously, the kind who allowed himself to tumble, graceful and tolerant, into any—nearly any—connexion offered him. Lytton was so rarely offered anything; he was the one who offered.

Well, Duncan had accepted him. When Lytton asked, ‘Will you have me?’ Duncan replied, ‘Will you take me?’ and Lytton said, ‘Yes—oh yes.’ What did it matter who loved and was loved when there _was_ love, and Duncan was sprawled on his back in the thick grass, gazing deliriously upwards as Lytton brought him off? There was love; it was bowing before Duncan’s beautiful body and licking the spend from his stomach, which swelled and sunk as he breathed. 

After Lytton had finished with that, he rested his head on Duncan’s thighs and watched (hazily; his spectacles he had taken off) bumblebees flickering among the grass and the fallen apples. The morning was wearing away into a hot midday; even in the shade of the orchard, sweat clung to their skin. When the grass began to itch, they would pull their wrinkled clothing about them and walk back to the house where they were staying. Lytton imagined what he would tell James when they were alone and could speak in confidence; and then there was Keynes to write to. Words fizzed in Lytton’s throat and fingers. Everything was eminently expressible.

_Divine_ , Lytton would write Keynes, _irrepressibly so! It is Duncan. You must have guessed already. How impossible it is! And yet it has happened! I cannot still myself. Such great hearts_ …

 

* * *

 

October 1905

69 Lancaster Gate, London

It was enough, Lytton had concluded, to stand at the center of his sphere, small and obscure as it was, and wait till Duncan came blasting through. There would be no grasping; there would be no slavering; Lytton would make no demands (yes, he had concluded so) to be loved. In this manner he reinforced himself. He braced his hands on the desk by the window in his little bedroom at Lancaster Gate, and peered down into the grey street below. 

For Duncan was behind him, sitting on the edge of his bed, rumpling the quilt, then rising again to pace the length of the room. If Lytton turned his head he would be quite undone.

‘I adore you,’ said Duncan, in a manner which suggested that the statement would be true only with certain emendations. ‘I have a passion for you. I do! But I don’t know that what you feel for me can be—met. With a feeling from myself that is similar in quantity and force. And it would be wrong to receive love that can’t be returned—in equal measure. So it’s all a matter of wishing not to be false: that’s all.’

‘How very, very, very— How very good you are.’ Behind his moustache Lytton’s lip trembled. Nervously he smoothed the moustache down, trying in vain to make himself still. His fingertips began trembling also; it was because of Duncan’s goodness. ‘If there _is_ anything it’s all a matter of, it’s the matter of my deserving to be loved by you. You do _know_ you are a genius, qua artist? It is all I can do to cultivate my _self_ as an artist, and hope that we may meet each other.’ 

Duncan was young yet, and though he had been encouraged artistically, he had not been flattered enough to believe fully in his own supremacy. He sputtered when Lytton said the word _genius_ , and clutched plaintively at Lytton’s shoulder.

‘It hasn’t got to do with how much one is developed as an artist,’ said Duncan. ‘If that were the case I wouldn’t be deserving of anything myself. You’re much more superior in that regard, in your own way. I mean you’ve your poetry. No, I think it’s got to do with nature. Some minds are more suited to one another—’

‘So it is my mind you find insufficient. I had thought it was my body you were disgusted by; I had tried so terribly hard to keep from overwhelming you physically. Of course I misjudged.’ 

Lytton turned round at last. His voice, then, took on the crispness of conscious cruelty. He went on to say, ‘You’re twenty years old; you develop a passion for any man who happens to brush your prick through your trousers. One mustn’t, naturally, take that to mean you’ve any particular mental communion with him.’

It would have brought Lytton immense satisfaction to see Duncan’s face—his gentle brow, his full sensuous mouth—crumple in self-interested anger; to hear Duncan spit a rejoinder; to receive, perhaps, a jostle or an impulsive slap. Lytton did (he admitted it to himself) want to be adored by Duncan, but he would like it almost as much if he were to be punished: the dedication required of sadism was not unlike the dedication required of love. 

Duncan, alas, was unwilling to play the sadist, at least in any sense that Lytton would have really enjoyed. He took Lytton’s hands in his own, rubbing them consolingly, till Lytton drew away. He must have believed that Lytton would lap up the scraps of his affection. No, Lytton would have all of whomever he had.

‘I adore you,’ Duncan repeated. 

‘Ah! Yes, so you’ve said. What you have not said,’ said Lytton, affecting archness, ‘was that you do not adore me _enough_.’

‘Not— Not— Not in the right way. Or perhaps not— Oh, I can’t put it into words; these things I never can.’ Lifting Lytton’s hand, brushing his lips over Lytton’s ink-stained knuckles, he said, ‘Let me kiss you again, my dear, so that you’ll forgive me.’

If either of them did believe that they had a mental communion of sorts, their belief would be struck down, absolutely shattered, by the bare fact that Duncan did not realise it was beside the point to ask for Lytton’s forgiveness. Lytton had forgiven him already, for all transgressions past and future, inasmuch as he was capable of forgiving; and besides that, in the hideous heart of him, he found it impossible. Duncan’s mouth was hovering over Lytton’s, waiting to be taken up, and Lytton thought how vilely unfair it was that he had no one who would give themselves to him fully. If there were not other lovers there was Cambridge, and if there was not Cambridge there was art, and if there was not art there was a telegram to be sent, or a train to be taken.

All the same Lytton kissed Duncan: he seized Duncan’s shoulders and pressed his mouth into Duncan’s in the imperious manner which typically presaged the taking-off of clothes. Of course one never could tell how it would turn out. When he had first asked to kiss Duncan, that summer morning in the orchard, he had anticipated spending the rest of the day sulking shamefully. How unusual people were! They could not, however noble, be relied upon for constancy. But would Lytton rely on Duncan to fuck him now, and never mind the next forty or so years? _I will_ , thought Lytton, slipping his fingers into Duncan’s hair, _I will, oh I will._

 

* * *

 

ii. _l’affaire james_

February 1906

Ledbury, Herefordshire

The little bedroom began quickly to go black, then lighted again, then black, then lighted again. The marigold-pattern wallpaper spiralled in and out of Duncan’s vision. For a moment he feared for his eyesight, or for his aunt’s electric lamps, but realised that this was the effect of his nervous habit of blinking. He felt there must have been some mode of expression besides blinking, struggled to discover it, and uttered at last a doubtful ‘—Ah?’ 

In front of Duncan, and clasping Duncan’s hands in a way that prevented him from turning away, stood dear, clean-faced, bespectacled James. Duncan saw in James’ features the clarity which came when all the complexities of one’s mind were wiped away by an abiding belief in— in one’s love— Oh, Lord! thought Duncan helplessly. He could only think of the drawing room at Lancaster Gate, and the young James yelping the number from H.M.S. Pinafore about ‘our saucy ship’s a beauty’ to piano accompaniment. One could copulate with a stranger one had met that afternoon in the National Gallery; it was a different thing altogether to attempt it with a Cambridge first-year whose family one had spent holidays with as a child. 

For it wasn’t merely that James had made a love-confession—then Duncan could have stroked his cheek and said, ‘What a sweet, sweet boy, and I love you also’—it was that he had made a proposal. He had ended with, ‘ _Will_ you have me?’ That was something his brother had asked, too.

Extricating his hands from James’, Duncan did, after all, stroke James’ cheek. Soon the cheek in question was colored by a blush worthy of a Boucher picture. Duncan wondered whether this was the first proposal James had made, then remembered about Lamb.

‘You know,’ said Duncan, ‘that I care for you too much to treat you coldly. I can’t simply shove you off—I wouldn’t generally, unless the person was really vile, but I especially wouldn’t do it to you.’ 

‘Yes, well, don’t shove me off, then,’ said James, with an invigorating iciness. It was as if the part of him which thought and the part of him which felt passion were separate, and spoke in turns. The passionate part had made its speech; now it gave way to the other. ‘I’ll only be your guest here for two days more. If you like, after I leave, you can refuse to talk to me ever again.’

That dispassionate, carelessly vicious part of James was right. It wouldn’t be a terrific bother for Duncan to have a go at it, to let James have a bit of a grope—and James would be so pleased. In two days he would float back to Cambridge feeling his lovesickness had run its course. It was the thought of James at breakfast the next morning, his face hovering brightly over the doilies and the plates of kedgeree and toast, that convinced Duncan to pull James down to the bed, pluck James’ spectacles from his face, and set them on the bedside table. Duncan was satisfied to see that it was then James’ turn to blink.

Once he and James were entangled (albeit still clothed: James was the sort who had got to be worked up to nudity), Duncan found his body amenable. The body was the body; it liked to be acknowledged. James had a way of putting his thigh between Duncan’s thighs and rubbing bluntly along Duncan’s cock that was tremendously gratifying—for one thing, James’ legs were thicker than his brother’s. 

But what if James took this, this stroking of his back and nuzzling of his neck, as a marriage? What if it was dishonorable of Duncan to kiss James’ lips and mean it only as a gesture of friendship? Months before, Lytton and Duncan had agreed that honesty, however painful, would take precedence over all else. Honesty would be like the dominant colour-note in a picture. There would be a splotch of passion in the corner, yes, and a stroke of kindness there ... perhaps also jealousy, perhaps cruelty … but always honesty. That was the only way anyone could live.

Resolving to tell James that he could not be his lover really, Duncan attempted to disentangle himself. James clutched at his shoulders and, pressing himself closer, began to shudder with an intensity that could only have been caused by either excruciating toothache or orgasm. Feeling that in either case some comfort would be appropriate, Duncan rubbed his palm over James’ back, which was covered still by jacket, shirt and vest. 

‘Yes, it’s rather difficult to go back to masturbation afterwards,’ said Duncan, pulling his fingers through James’ ruffled hair. ‘But you do realise that I can’t— You see, I’m not the sort of person who loves one person only, forever. You mustn’t take that to mean you aren’t my absolute dearest of friends.’

‘I know what you’re like,’ said James. ‘I do _talk_ to my brother. He _is_ the sort to love one person only, forever; so if you aren’t really lovers the fault must lie with you.’

‘It does lie with me,’ said Duncan. Carefully he tucked each errant strand of hair behind James’ ears, smoothing down the bent or frizzled pieces. He tried not to be cross when James shifted his head on the pillow and mussed his hair again. 

For Lytton, Duncan felt, or had felt, passion. For James he felt a sort of brotherly (cousinly?) tenderness which had not been in any way soured by having just brought him off. The copulation, if one could call it that, had been a protective gesture; Duncan hadn’t wanted James to know just yet how it felt to be turned away. 

Perhaps the next man James proposed to would make a marriage of it, and they would take rooms in Cambridge together and do it all up in James’ favoured shade of apple-green. Then Duncan could bring the couple a tea set as a wedding present, and have them sit for a picture. Duncan did think it was possible—eminently possible. Yet it was still to be seen whether he would ever wish to propose to someone as James had done to him. The happiness of his friends was a matter of course; his own, less so. 

‘Did I ever tell you,’ said Duncan, ‘my uncle had a doctor examine me for signs of imbecility because he was irritated I never finished any of my pictures?’ 

‘You told me it was because he caught you reading a book about loose women,’ said James.

‘Oh, that was the start of it. Then I suppose he looked at my pictures and began to think they were never finished because I was always running off to brothels, or playing with myself, or something. Actually it was funny to be accused of being excessively normal. Well, I saw the doctor and he said he never finished his pictures himself.’

‘So you got away with it that time,’ said James archly. Then he turned onto his side and pressed his face into the pillow, so that even if Duncan were to lean in he would not be able to kiss him on the mouth.

 

* * *

 

iii. _l’affaire george_

February 1908

Cambridge

From the staircase there sounded the apocalyptic trampling of a well-built and hearty undergraduate who had not yet learned how to temper the violence of his step. He was always in too much of a hurry to ascend. James, _au contraire_ , was content to lie on his side on the sofa in the sitting room of his Cambridge set, rubbing his fingers idly along the green sackcloth he had draped over the sofa cushions. He closed his eyes just as Mallory rattled the doorknob so that the lock slid loose and the door swung inwards.

‘Strachey! I’ve missed lectures; I thought I would come and sit by your fire.’

‘I was sleeping,’ James groaned, flinging his arm over his eyes. 

Mallory was pulling open the drapes, letting in the hazy grey light of late winter. The fire was low; in the hearth there were only red coals scattered in the ashes, and a few last bold flames. The chill was creeping in, but James had been so contented that he had not minded. Now he shivered. Directly he chafed his hands he regretted it, for Mallory came to sit at the edge of the sofa, pushing against James’ legs. 

‘I was bored without you,’ said Mallory. ‘Arthur Hobhouse took Rupert Brooke and I to lunch, and of course it was kind of him, but I felt he was testing me in something, and I didn’t know what. By the end of it I felt glad to be done. Oh, we did have champagne and wine. I’m a little giddy.’ 

The real trouble with Rupert, the real torment of the heart, had ended more than a year before. Rupert had uncoupled himself from James, slowly but perceptibly. Then there were only the bored, belated letters sent while Rupert was looking at cathedrals in Florence, and later the few sentences they would exchange if they happened across each other in the street. Yet James felt ungracious towards Mallory for having been so close to the beloved.

It was true that Mallory had something like the face of an Apollo, if the Apollo in question had poorly-cut brown hair, eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, and ears like sails in full wind. That was not an adequate reason for him to be made an Apostle. The last time someone was made an Apostle on the basis of his looks it was Hobhouse, and then Hobhouse’s function was only to be buggered by those poor souls (chiefly Lytton) who were in love with someone else.

Nudging Mallory’s back with his knee, James said, ‘I’ve an essay on the ancient Ottomans. I can’t have you here sitting on my legs while I write.’ 

‘Let me stay,’ said Mallory. ‘I’ll be quiet. I’ll sit by your legs, like a dog.’ 

‘Stoke the fire first,’ said James. 

Dutifully, without asking so much as why he ought to be the one to do it, Mallory did. James had meant to turn him out after the room was warm enough for him to commence with his intellectual work, but his obedience was so moving that James could not help but be lenient. So they sat together at James’ desk before the window, James in the chair and Mallory knelt at James’ feet, resting his head on James’ knee. Now and then, invaded by the remnants of the old affection, James deigned to stroke Mallory’s hair, eliciting a sigh and a nestling-closer. 

After the last page of the essay was added to the stack on the table, Mallory rose, only slightly, to sit on James’ lap. Then he flung his arms around James’ neck. Looking closely into James’ face, Mallory said, ‘Why don’t you allow me? I’m not shy of it, you know: I’ll do what you like.’ 

‘Then find someone else to adore, and let me alone,’ said James. ‘Cambridge is nothing more than a hot soup of buggery with bits and pieces of poems stirred in. You could walk down the stairs and find someone.’

He supposed he had been meaning to wound Mallory—only slightly, for Mallory was sensitive, and bled a great deal from a small psychic cut. With him, James could never muster up the absolute frigidity he had shown others. The effect was that Mallory remained persistent. Even as James turned his head, he felt Mallory’s fingers rubbing beneath his collar. 

‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘If I got it from anyone else I shouldn’t _like_ it.’ 

‘Then you might as well take vows,’ said James. For he knew he would not copulate with Mallory in the same way that he knew he would not join the Navy, or become a great flautist, or learn how to make ganache: these things were not physically impossible, simply out of the bounds of his life as he knew it. 

If Mallory was really a sodomite he would discover this with the aid of someone else’s body (perhaps Rupert’s), at which point James might be prevailed upon to offer advice or consolation. But James was determined that Mallory should leave Cambridge having been in James’ bed only the one time. That, of course, was the time Mallory had been out on a spree with the Magdalene 1st VIII, and vomited in the stairwell on his way up to James’ rooms. James had washed Mallory’s face, undressed him, and put him to bed. He himself slept on the sofa in the sitting room, covered by the green sackcloth.

 

* * *

 

March 1908

Cambridge

‘Ah, yes, well,’ said Mallory, ‘it’s not as bad as I’d— I mean, it does feel all right. One can acclimate oneself to anything if one’s determined, I’ve always said.’ 

They were front-to-front, and close enough in height and proportion that they could not help looking into each other’s faces. Furthermore James could not help smelling the remnants of that afternoon’s tea on Mallory’s breath. He felt supremely discouraged by the fact that one had got to have a body, and put up with all its indignities and urges, if one wanted to have an intellect at all. To James the romance in life was in the mind; yet here he was, putting off his German work in favour of buggering the one man he had resolved absolutely not to bugger.

Politely Mallory ventured to ask, ‘Is this, you know…the essence of the matter?’

‘I shouldn’t say any matter _has_ an essence,’ said James. ‘As far as metaphysics go we’re rather beyond Aristotle. Have you read Schopenhauer?’

‘No,’ said Mallory. 

‘It’s all right,’ said James, ‘you needn’t,’ and, taking hold of the backs of Mallory’s knees, began a sort of languid, inefficient thrusting. 

When James was virginal, he remembered (as though it had been long ago), it hadn’t taken nearly so much to excite him to finish. Even now, the simple motion of his body against Mallory’s was enough to ease his irritation. He did think it would be best to do away with the physical entirely, but he supposed that if one had got to contend with things like stomach cramp and poor eyesight, he might as well take immoral pleasure. Mallory, meanwhile, looked fairly stricken; his wide eyes had taken on the glimmer of pathos. 

‘Does it hurt?’ asked James, slowing. 

‘No, it doesn’t hurt. I suppose I thought it would feel different, that’s all.’ 

‘My dear, I think you have discovered an essence: that of love affairs.’ Sensing that he could bring himself off fairly quickly if he worked at it, James took fresh hold of Mallory’s thighs and, moving with rather more passion, said, ‘That’s what it is, really—loving, and buggering. Imagining the affair, pursuing it, experiencing it—and in the end it wasn’t what you meant at all, with the consequence that you go on looking for what you had wanted in the first place. You can’t imagine how disappointed I was when Rupert decided to try kissing me. He’s so damnably beautiful I don’t think anyone had bothered to tell him he kissed like a dog licking a window. But I loved him, still! You’ll see…. Oh, here, just a mo’, it’ll be better if I do this—’

Feeling that they had not yet reached the level of intimacy at which they could let off their spunk in or on each other's bodies, James knelt between Mallory’s spread thighs and, taking himself in hand, soiled his own linen instead. At that moment he wondered why he hadn’t insisted on going to Mallory’s rooms. It was Mallory, after all, who had demanded they copulate. Now Mallory, having been less than satisfied by the act itself, looked up at James so sweetly that James felt it was his responsibility to lay down beside Mallory and bring him off with his hand. With a little trembling and a furrowing of the brow, Mallory was spent, and slumped back with an enormous, grateful sigh into James’ heap of pillows. 

James, watching Mallory wipe his stomach with his hand and wipe his hand on the linen, wondered idly what he would write to Lytton. Ought he be cruel, ought he make Lytton jealous, ought he say it was bliss? After all, to Lytton, Mallory was Mon-Dieu-George-Mallory. Or ought James be pitiful, and wait for Lytton to write something scathing in return? Once Mallory had gone, thought James, he would dash something off and send it by the last post; but Mallory, ever-hopeful, was flinging his arm over James’ waist, holding him down.

 

* * *

 

iv. _l’affaire maynard_

June 1908

Cambridge

Summer at Cambridge, despite that Duncan had never been a student there, had the feeling of youth: ephemeral in a material sense, but in the spiritual sense, enduring. The high afternoon sun lighted the facades of King's brilliantly, and the Cam was crowded with punts, some wobbly and some gliding along so quickly that if Duncan glanced away from the window and then looked back he would find them gone. He was meant, he knew, to be doing a watercolour study of the chapel as seen from Maynard's sitting room, but he had only got so far as the pencil sketch before he got bored with the fiddly architectural bits.

What he wanted was to paint the human form: an expanse of flesh coloured by cool shadows, rising here and falling there, resolving into the fine strokes of the fingers and toes. Inconveniently, Maynard was off giving a lecture on the Indian monetary system; and even if he were there, it was entirely possible he would refuse to sit to Duncan. They had never seen each other in the nude. 

In lieu of a sitter Duncan relied on his imagination: he closed his eyes against the sunlight and described to himself the drape of an arm over the edge of a sofa, the snug of a leg pulled up to the body. These softer lines he drew lightly in the spaces left in his view of the chapel. Once he had exhausted his imagination, however, he found it impossible to erase the little half-bodies and get on with filling in the details of the stained glass windows. June had only just begun, he thought, setting the sketch aside: there would be other fine days. 

It was that evening, when the sun had gone down and the chapel's stained glass windows filled with interior light, that Duncan first tried in earnest to be Maynard's lover. For several months there had been the question of love between them; it was only that now Duncan felt himself spilling over. Maynard was sitting in his armchair, squinting down in the dim lamplight at the letters he'd received that evening (one, Duncan noted, was from Lytton), and Duncan felt moved, unstoppably, to take the letters from Maynard's hands, put them on a nearby table, and drop himself into Maynard's lap. 

'Haven't you had enough?' asked Duncan. 'What does Lytton say, anyway?'

‘He tells me that James tells him Brooke's been elected to the Apostles, but not George Mallory,' said Maynard. 'Frankly I think Mallory has the sounder mind, if not quite such an ability to dazzle, but of course after the affair with James it would have been impossible. How fickle we are, really. But you were right to take it all out of my hands, my dear. Did you finish your view of the chapel?'

'I didn't get to the colours,' said Duncan, curling his arm around Maynard's neck, sliding his fingers through Maynard's macassar-slick hair. 'Or the water, even. I was thinking of you.'

'I'm sorry to have distracted you,' said Maynard. He seemed genuinely sorry that Duncan hadn’t worked; it was as if he felt it was a pitiable thing, the state of being in love. Or perhaps it was only that he was sorry Duncan was in love with him, out of all the world. Maynard didn’t see the brightness of his own mind, or the loveliness of his body. 

‘The only way you can possibly make it up to me,’ said Duncan, ‘is if you let me distract you, too.’ 

So as not to allow Maynard time to formulate some reply about the economics of exchange rates, Duncan clutched the sides of Maynard's head and gave him a long, wet kiss on the mouth. They had kissed before, in a minor key—touches of lips to the sides of mouths, nuzzles of noses—but Maynard had never responded with anything that might have been called passion. All the same Duncan felt it in him, that appetite. Maynard was like a young artist who, having accumulated a thousand visions of beauty, had not yet learnt the technique that would allow him to release them into his pictures. 

Pulling back, shrinking into the depths of the armchair, Maynard said, 'You must believe me when I say that I don't expect you to feel for me what I feel for you. The human heart rarely works so efficiently. What I loathe, above all, is being treated as an object of pity. I don't want to be loved if I am not loved.'

'But I do,' said Duncan, pulling Maynard into the light again. 'I feel affection—I've felt affection—for a good deal of people. And lust, I’ve felt that too. I don't love so often. Somehow I do— I do...you. I do love you. So I would like it if you would concede to being kissed by me.’

‘What right have I?’ said Maynard. ‘We can be great friends. I don’t see why I should fling my hideous body against yours.’ 

'Because I want you to,’ said Duncan. ‘That’s all. I haven’t built up my case, really. I haven’t ever had to, before. You’re the only person I’ve proposed to who hasn’t simply said, “Oh, all right”. And somehow you’re the only one I’ve really wanted to accept me. Do say “Oh, all right”. —No, no, don’t say that. Say, “Yes, I will”. You haven’t even to say you love me or adore me or anything like that: only “Yes, I will”.’

‘I will,’ said Maynard.

‘No, you’ve got to say all of it. Then kiss me.’

‘Yes, I will,’ said Maynard, as flatly as if he were reciting a sum. That was Maynard’s manner: he talked about the affairs of the heart with as much feeling (that is to say none at all) as he talked about the likelihood of rain. His bottom was soft from sitting in chairs, and he had a squint from reading small type. 

Duncan saw no reason why he should care for Maynard at all, yet cared for him more than nearly anyone else. He felt, seated still in Maynard’s lap, clinging to Maynard’s sloping shoulders, that he might shriek out of sheer bewilderment. To prevent this, he pulled Maynard close and kissed him—gently at first, so that they could wet their dry lips, and then plungingly, sighing. 

Even with the window in the sitting room cracked open, the air between them was hot; Duncan wiped Maynard’s hair from his forehead and felt it moist with sweat. The occasional shout or laugh issued from the lawn below, each time catching at the edge of Duncan’s mind before slipping away again. When Duncan opened his eyes, he saw that the whole of his vision was taken up with Maynard: there was the lightly freckled bridge of his nose, the thick brown ridges of his eyebrows, his eyes moving rapidly beneath closed eyelids. Once Maynard detected that he was no longer being kissed, he opened his eyes also.

‘I did say that I would,’ said Maynard; there was a touch of uncharacteristic petulance there that Duncan adored. It showed that human character was not a pattern infinitely repeating. ‘Shall I say it again, if you’ll kiss me for it?’

He hadn’t to say it again: Duncan kissed him regardless. But as soon as there was a lull in the kissing, Maynard said, ‘I will. —I mean that I will say it again, and that I will.’

By the light of the early morning, without disentangling himself from the linen, Duncan sketched Maynard’s naked body for the first time. The drawing was in pencil, on the back of the piece of watercolour paper he had used the day before; the thick texture of the paper and the bluntness of the pencil made the lines feel somehow permeable and welcoming, as if the outline of the body was not the end of the body. In the drawing, Maynard’s limbs blurred into the wrinkled linen; the curves of his tousled hair merged with the indentations of the pillow beneath his heavy head. The thing wouldn’t do as a painting, Duncan knew, but there would be paintings upon paintings; he'd the rest of his life for paintings. If Maynard refused to sit to him, he would draw in the morning, before Maynard woke. Maynard was waking, now, fifteen minutes before his alarm clock was set to ring: he stirred in the linen, reaching blindly for Duncan’s hand.

 

* * *

 

August 1908

Orkney Islands, Scotland

Going north, past Rothiemurchus and up to the Orkneys, seemed to Duncan a cleansing gesture, as if one was moving closer to the center of things. After a week’s holiday with Maynard at the Mason’s Arms in Stromness, Duncan fairly forgot he had lived anywhere else. 

Each day they woke before dawn and held each other in bed till the sun had cleared the curved border of the ocean. Following eggs and square sausage and black pudding at the hotel, they went out. For there was the sea, which was the turquoise of Canaletto’s Venice and looked as if it had been trapped under slowly rippling glass; there was the sky, bearing down on the black-capped mountains of Hoy visible in the distance; there was the land, with heather blooming purple, soft enough to make a pillow. What else? Oh, Duncan’s pictures, yes, and Maynard’s book on probability, and all their letters reminding them that Cambridge and London and Paris were still there, waiting. But when they went down together to the rocky shore they took nothing but the key to their room and a few spare coins for lunch. 

There was one afternoon when, finding themselves alone on a cliff overlooking the place where the North Sea and the Atlantic mixed, they kissed each other in fits and starts until they overcame their shyness altogether. Holding their discarded clothes down with rocks to prevent the possibility that the wind would blow it all away and they would have to walk back to the Mason’s Arms starkers, they sucked each other off in turn, pausing now and then to laugh at the realisation that if they had been in Maynard’s rooms at King’s they should have had to keep quiet for fear of being overheard. Here they were, if not free precisely, unrestrained. After putting on their clothes again they stood at the edge of the cliff and yelped nonsense down into the water.

‘I’m on top of the world,’ cried Duncan, after he had exhausted all other more meaningful utterances, including ‘arsehole’ and ‘bollocks’.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Maynard. ‘Putting aside the fact that there is no such thing as “the top of the world”, you’re about two thousand miles from the North Pole, and about nine thousand feet below the peak of Everest.’

‘I’m close enough,’ said Duncan. 

He seized Maynard by the waist and made as if he meant to throw him over the cliff. At the last moment (perhaps not the very last moment!) he pulled Maynard back and kissed him, hoping Maynard would understand the kiss to mean that if Maynard went over the cliff, Duncan would follow without complaint. 

That was the sort of sentiment which Duncan felt was often better conveyed by kissing than by talking. Nonetheless he attempted the talking later that evening, as he lay in bed with Maynard, freshly clean from his bath and marvelling at how his legs ached. 

Putting his head on Maynard’s shoulder, rubbing his palm over Maynard’s bare chest, he said, ‘I don’t really see any reason why we shouldn’t stay here, like this.’

‘Because neither of us can make a career in the Orkneys,’ said Maynard.

‘As an artist and an economist, no,’ said Duncan, ‘but perhaps as fishermen, or, I don’t know, shepherds.’ 

‘We’ll come here again next summer,’ said Maynard, ‘and appreciate it all the more for having not been here the rest of the year. And for not having to be shepherds.’

‘Next summer, then,’ said Duncan, thinking privately that time here was stretched so long he could not conceive of an end to this summer, let alone the beginning of the next. 

But the hours had a way of letting themselves loose, and the days followed the hours, and the weeks the days. It had been three years, practically to the day, since Duncan and Lytton had spent the morning in the orchard, kissing so softly they seemed not to be touching. Duncan had felt then that it was impossible for him ever to be any older than twenty. Of course he would have believed it impossible that, at twenty-three, he would know such love as he did. 

The next day they spent on the shore just by Stromness, rolling up their trouser-legs and leaping precariously from one slippery stone to another. Here there were people, other holiday-makers, and there could be no caressing; still James and Duncan walked down the beach arm-in-arm, and adjusted each other’s wind-wrinkled clothing. Scampering up to the water to retrieve a piece of sea glass he saw sparkling in the sand, Duncan heard Maynard calling out after him, and turned. There Maynard was, wind-chafed rather and with his hair tousled, squinting into the bright horizon. It occurred to Duncan then that before they left Stromness he should like to do a picture of Maynard at work on his book, sat in a chair with his writing-board on his lap, gazing out of the canvas with the hazy familiarity that only lovers shared.

 

* * *


End file.
